


The Art We Wished We Could Make

by aWritingSparrow



Category: Ouran High School Host Club - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Humor, Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-04
Updated: 2021-03-02
Packaged: 2021-03-16 11:21:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29206527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aWritingSparrow/pseuds/aWritingSparrow
Summary: Caelie Ellisson moved to the opposite side of the United States to get away from the heavy expectations of her parents. She expected a place where she could spend time painting and drawing. What she didn't expect was the rowdy members of the Host Club moving in downstairs. Nor did she expect to recognize a face in the crowd. All she knew now, was her definition of normal was soon going to have to change.
Relationships: Ootori Kyouya/Original Female Character(s)
Comments: 1
Kudos: 4





	1. A Rough Sketch

I never intended to do anything too outrageous in my life. Honestly, I just wanted to escape my parents’ expectations. It’s why I left without bothering to tell anyone where I was going. They called me nonstop in those first few weeks after that, trying to get me to come back, to understand what they had meant. Over time, those daily calls started becoming once a month, and eventually they came once in a blue moon. I managed to find myself a small one-bedroom apartment that was barely within my budget, but it was in the middle of the city. Andy, the landlord, was even offering me free Wi-Fi with the rent, so that was one less expense I would have to worry about at the end of the month. Perks of being friends with him I suppose.

The apartment itself was the smallest in the building and, at least from the smell of it, had been inhabited by someone who had at one point stored nothing but moth balls and cat litter in the main living space. And calling it a two-room apartment was really generous. It was more like one largish room, with a slightly-larger-than-a-walk-in closet-sized room on one side. I had managed to find a bed and couch second-hand and paid for them with the part of my savings I hadn’t set aside for food this month. 

Trying to get those pieces of furniture up the stairs was a different story altogether. The building had an elevator, so with the help of a screwdriver on loan from Andy I was able to fit the bed and mattress into it to take up. No way I was going to be able to do the same for the couch. I roll up my sleeves and look at the staircase, before pulling it up onto the first flight. Thankfully, the ‘couch’ was more of a loveseat so when I got to a rounded part of the staircase the only thing I had to do was push it to the next set a few steps away. Still, by the time I managed to climb all 6 flights, my arms and legs were both shaking from over-exertion. I pushed the couch far enough inside to not block the door, kicked it shut behind me, and collapsed onto it, sneezing as a dust cloud forms in the air. I didn’t really care though. After nearly 22 years of someone constantly looking over my shoulder, privacy was finally mine.

“Knock knock,” Andy says, as he opened my door. “I thought I told you to lock the door on the way in?”

“Ya,” I say, rubbing my nose as I stifle another sneeze, “and I told you I have an open-door policy for people I consider my friends. Besides, it’s not like anyone is going to find their way up here in the first place. I’m a nobody, and that’s all that matters.”

Andy doesn’t say anything to that, just looks around the barren main room. The lady who had lived here before me had been here since the building had opened. It looked like it, and not in a good way. Peeling wallpaper that had turned faded and yellow with age, its musty smell fighting to combat the faint whiff of what might have been cat piss. I wasn’t sure to be honest, though when I leaned over to get up from the couch, I could tell it was coming from the old rug she had left behind.  
I curl up my nose, “Going to have to get that cleaned… or burned.” I reach down to pick it up, but stop at the last minute. If it smelled like that, no way I should be touching it with bare hands. “Burned, definitely burned.”

As I’m turning to ask Andy if he has a spare set of rubber gloves, he holds something in front of me. “We might be friends,” he says, “but I still need you to sign your lease. You know, that email I sent you will all the flags marking it as super important and please read and understand it?”

I look at him, then at the papers he was holding in front of me, then back at him again. I try to say that I had in fact read the lease, but stop. I rack my brain, what had I been doing? I close my eyes and picture it. “I was at my desk,” I hear myself saying out-loud as I do, “and I opened up your email. I read the first line and then…” I trail off. “I… got distracted by an offer for a new commission.”

I open my eyes, and Andy is shaking his head at me, trying not to laugh. “You really need to learn to focus on one thing at a time.” He pushes the papers into my hands again, then stands there while I skim over the first couple of pages. Taking the pen from his other hand, I start to sign.

“Hold on now,” he grabs my arm, “don’t you want to read the whole thing? For all you know, I could be locking you into something really bad.”  
I raise an eyebrow and smile, “Have you written something into this that would screw me over till the end of time?”

“Well… no,” he admits as I go back to signing, “but I could have.”

“You have been one of my best friends for a while now. You got me my first summer job, introduced me to your friends, and offered me the smallest apartment in your building for less than it’s worth,” I say, handing the lease back to him. “I trust you Andy.”

“Right… well,” he looks down at the lease like he wasn’t sure what to say against that, smiling after a little bit. He looks around the room, and his eyes settle on the cat-piss rug. He looks up, and we make eye contact. “Give me a second,” he leaves the apartment, and I start pulling stuff out of my backpack and looking around for a place to put it.

When he comes back in, I’m huddled in the corner with my laptop, checking my emails to see if I’ve gotten any more commission requests since I checked this morning before I left home. I probably wouldn’t have noticed him coming back in if he hadn’t been making a ton of noise. “Here’s a little moving-in gift for you,” he says, doing his best to not drop the box he was carrying. “It’s not much, but you’ll need something to work at that isn’t the floor.”  
“Oh,” I get up, “you didn’t have to get me anything.” I walk over to help him with the box and see a pair of heavy-duty work gloves in the back pocket of his jeans. We lean the box over on its side and prop it against the wall.

“Trust me, you’re doing me a favor by taking it,” Andy pulls the gloves from his pocket and puts them on. He starts to roll the rug up, nose curling up as he does so. “My grandmother gave it to me, saying something about every person starting out needs to have a table of some kind. For eating, working, putting things on. Doesn’t matter, everyone needs a table.” He picks up the rug and goes to leave. “Oh, one more thing,” he stops and turns to me, but stops himself. “Um… never mind, you’ll figure it out on your own.” He turns and leaves, shutting the door behind him. I wait five minutes, but he doesn’t come back. I flopped back down onto my couch, vowing to open Andy’s box later. 

Later turned out to be a few hours later, because between one blink and the next a few hours had passed, and the sun was starting to go down. I groan and sit up, searching around for a stick of gum to try and draw out the taste of death that had developed in my mouth. With that sorted, I finally get up and go to open the box.  
It’s a coffee table. Still in its separate parts. Probably from an Ikea. I check my phone, 8pm. I should probably just build it in the morning. Try and work on my commissions. Still though, Andy was right. It would be easier to work with a surface that wasn’t the floor. I pull all the pieces out and set to work. It was going to be a long night.

The rest of those first weeks went by in a blur, and I didn’t really realize how much time had passed till my parent’s called me one Saturday afternoon. I almost answered it, just to tell them that I was fine and they didn’t have to worry, but I stopped myself. I didn’t owe them anything as small as a phone call. I couldn’t decline it though, so I watched it ring out, and when my phone went silent I waited to see if they left a voicemail. They didn’t. I’m not sure what I would do if they did.  
I started taking on more commissions, regardless of the medium. If I had it with my art supplies, I would attempt it. Digital, pastels, gouache, it didn’t matter to me. At first it was a lot of requests for more of an… adult… kind of content. Not sure what I was expecting when I added ‘no questions asked’ to my offers honestly. I wasn’t exactly happy that ninety percent of the offers I was getting were lewd, but I needed the money if I didn’t want to get a job at Starbucks or something like that. So, I swallowed my pride and kept telling myself ‘money is money’, and then turning around and praying to any gods that may or may not have existed for forgiveness from my sins.

Things did start to pick up after a little while though, and after another month or two I was able to drop the ‘no questions asked’ part of my ads and be more choosy about who I wanted as a client. Life fell into a peaceful kind of routine. I was hanging out with Andy and his friends, who eventually became my friends. I was making a name for myself, and my parents were calling me less and less.

All I wanted was to live a quiet, private existence. But then the Host Club moved in downstairs.


	2. Cleaning up the Lines

I was somewhere between taking the first batch of cookies out of the oven and putting the second batch in when I heard the sounds of a couple of trucks stopping outside, followed by the sounds of people entering the building. A lot more people than usual. I put the second batch in the oven and go to wash my hands, gazing around the room while I did. Since moving in and becoming more popular, I managed to replace the dusty old couch with a slightly newer, less dusty one that had space for more than two people. I’d managed to peel the old wallpaper off, gave them a fresh coat of paint, and whenever I was in the mood for it, I’d add to the hodgepodge of work I’d started when I gave up after the base coat. In fact… the only thing that hadn’t changed in the slightest was the coffee table Andy had given me.

It was still a little early though to be going down and introducing myself, so after I transfer the first batch to a cooling rack I take a peek through the curtains to see if I could tell how many were already here. Andy had only mentioned a larger group, but that could mean anything from five to fifty. I scan the street, but all I can see from the window was the moving truck, and the moving truck behind it. Odd, I mean, sure most of the apartments that weren’t mine were pretty big, but these trucks were large. No way all the stuff in those trucks would fit in two, let alone one apartment. Maybe they were taking the rest to a storage facility afterwards? After a little bit, I see what looks like a group of boys walking down the street past the trucks, talking amongst themselves.

It was hard to tell what they looked like looking through a sixth story window that I hadn’t cleaned in a while, but I was still surprised when they stopped outside the building. Sure, Andy’s building is nicer than a lot of other places, but these guys looked like they were rich.  _ Really _ rich, not people who would normally live in a place like this. Andy had mentioned previously that the new tenants would be, well the word he used was eccentric. He didn’t mention that they could all probably buy the building if they really wanted to. Which brought me to my final thought, why here of all places? This slightly-above-average but not really something you would spend over $10,000 on monthly. I’m sure there are better buildings and apartments than this one.

I didn’t have any more time to think about it, because the next moment Andy is knocking on and opening my door. “Hey, I suppose you hear the moving truck based on the smell,” he laughs, reaching for a cookie still on the cookie rack.

I ran back over to him and smack his hand, “Bad landlord, those cookies are for the new neighbors. You can have the ones sitting over there,” I point to the small collection of misshapen and not aesthetically pleasing cookies that had made up my test batch.

He groans but takes one of the reject cookies from the pile and takes a bite, “So, they seem to be an…,” he starts coughing violently, pounding on his chest until a couple crumbs come flying out of his mouth. “Sorry... man that hurt. Anyways, they seem an interesting bunch. Though they did pay a year's rent up front. Makes me wonder why on earth they want to live here.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” I say, and we both pause as we listen to the sounds of things moving around downstairs. “Floor below mine has the biggest apartments, right?”

Andy nods, “Ya, though I’m not sure what they plan to do with all those moving trucks. What are you thinking, Caelie ?”

I drum my fingers on the stove top and look over at the canvas and the simple landscape I had been working on for a week now. It was only half finished, and it was maybe the third time I’ve painted on canvas but I was hoping the client would like it. “I’m thinking that I might have to buy more canvas soon,” I murmur, trying to imagine I was the client and not the artist.

“I was talking about the new guys but I suppose that’s also a valid point,” Andy says, finishing his cookie and going to leave, “I’m going to see if they need any help. Talk to you later,” he waves and I hear the door shut behind him.

I stand there for a few moments, still staring at the canvas, before my gaze goes to the window. Eventually the smell of baked goods turns my attention back to what I was actually doing in the moment, and I go to start cleaning up the mess I hadn’t actually cleaned yet. It was more of a way to pass time, because I was quietly listening, waiting to see when was a good time to go down and introduce myself.

* * *

A couple of days passed, and I could still hear them moving in. I knew I probably wasn’t the greatest example of a single day move in, but most of the other tenants that had moved in since I started living here had all their stuff moved in one day, maybe two at most. Four days later and I was pacing back and forth in my own apartment, sometimes working on my painting, but I was having a hard time focusing on it for more than a few minutes at a time. Eventually I threw myself on my couch and stared at the ceiling, trying to count the little dots that it seemed to make up.

I lost count after dot number 142, but that was also around the time I noticed that things had quieted down. I wait a few more moments, and hurry! They seemed to finally be done. I hop up from the couch, and pick up the tin-foil covered plate I had put the remaining cookies on, and head downstairs. Humming as I do so, I silently rehearse what I was planning on saying to them. I knock on the door, noticing at the same time the sign that says visitor’s welcome. I shrug and open the door, figuring they were like me in that regard.

I open the door, and any thoughts of what I was going to say just vanish from my head. I don’t really hear anything that they’re saying past a very obviously rehearsed, “Welcome!” I can tell that one of them is talking to me, but at the moment I’m looking just about everywhere else but at the various obvious fixtures of this apartment’s living room.

Somehow in three days they’d managed to repaint the room and put in new hardwood floors. Also… somehow the room seemed bigger? Like, there was no way that all of the various couches and tables that they had in there would fit in a normal apartment, much less a single room. And then, there were the boys themselves. They all appeared to be Japanese though one of them, the one who seemed to still be talking at me, had features that seemed to indicate some european heritage. All of them are wearing what I assume is traditional japanese attire.

“Well?” the blonde-haired one asks me, finally forcing me to focus more on the group of them.

“Um…” I try to think, but my brain was too busy trying to tell my limbs to leave this very strange situation. I finally manage some movement, thrusting the cookie platter into his arms.

“Hi, I’m your upstairs neighbor Caelie,” I say, taking two steps back into the doorway. “I just came down to say hi. Um… don’t be afraid to come by if you need anything. My door’s always open… unless I’m out then it’ll be locked.” All the boys seemed to be looking at the plate, then to me. I wave, “So ya… it was nice to meet you all. Bye!” I turn and shut the door behind me before they can say anything.

I take the stairs back up two at a time, enter my apartment, and for the first time since moving in here I lock the door while still being in the room. I sit down on my couch, and take a deep breath. What was that? Were they all just waiting around there for people to show up? Were they running some kind of business, and did Andy know about it? Some many questions, and I really didn’t want to go back downstairs to see if I could get any answers from them. I couldn’t hear anything coming from downstairs so I assumed they were still lounging around.

“Knock knock,” I hear Andy as he tries to open the door. He properly knocks. “Hey Caelie, I know you’re in there. I saw you head back upstairs.”

I wait a few more moments, before going over to the door and opening it. “Sorry, must have forgotten to unlock it when I closed the door,” I say quickly, holding the door open for him.

He stares at me for a few moments, “They must have startled you real bad huh?” he chuckles as he enters. “I mean it shocked me at first too, but it doesn’t hurt anyone so I don’t see any harm in letting them do it.”

We both sit down on the couch, and he unwraps his sandwich and takes a bite. “I just,” I finally start to find words that describe how I feel, “thought it was… strange I guess. I mean new neighbors normally means introducing yourself and maybe dropping some hints about how I’m always open to talk about new commissions. But this,” I snort a little trying to not laugh, “they were all just standing around like they were  _ waiting _ for people to come in.”

Andy laughs into his sandwich, “Well, I met them while they were still setting up. I talked to them for a bit. They said something about a ‘host club’. I looked it up when I had some time, mostly just meant for entertaining women.”

_ Entertaining women?!  _ My mind flies to a few different places in the moment, and I do my best to hide the look of surprise and shock on my face. “Well... that explains a few things,” I finally say, really wanting to pretend that I understand what he was talking about, but in this moment he could have told me they were a group of dimension jumping time travelers and I would probably believe him. At least, it would make more sense than the apparent “Women’s entertainment club” going on downstairs.

Andy nods and takes another bite, so it seems that hiding my surprise worked for the moment. We both sit there in silence for a while. I’m not sure if it’s because we don’t have anything else to say, or if it’s because we’re both listening to the sounds of footsteps below us. And the sound of a pair of feet coming up the stairs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this took so long to come out. Around the time I started writing I had a family emergency and everything got put to the side. I'm going to try and post more often now! Thanks for reading.


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